Social media mobilises change

Social media and the Internet has changed the way people respond to problems and is empowering people to form organised groups to collaborate, share information and drive business.

This is according to Clay Shirky, Internet technology expert from the New York University Tisch School and author of 'Here Comes Everybody'.

Speaking at the Tech4Africa keynote, last week, Shirky said the 20th-century media was focused on simply delivering information to the masses. Social media in the 21st century, however, is driving organised movements of change via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Shirky explained how the Internet has been used to create social change. Nisha Susan, a woman from the Mangalore province in India, started a Facebook group in response to a Hindu fundamentalist group that waged violence against women. The Facebook group rallied thousands of people and mainstream media to bring awareness around violence on Indian women.

According to Shirky, social media will play a critical role in delivering news that the formal South African news agencies would be unable to provide, should the proposed media tribunal and Protection of Information Bill get enacted.

“The big question is to what degree governments will look at freedom of expression in relation to social media. We've already seen a lot of governments struggling to tolerate this much community commitment on such a vast scale. An example of this is the UAE and RIM.

“On the proposal for a South African media tribunal, I believe that Wikileaks is going to become an increasing source of South African news.”

According to Internet World Statistics, over 1.5 billion people are connected to the Internet. Shirky said this means mass populations are empowered to not only consume information, but to work in aggregation and do things that wouldn't have been done in the past.

Shirky gave the example of PickupPal.com, an online car pooling service in the US which is coordinated via social media. The Web site uses a geo-location and social networking tool to enable people to interact with one another and coordinate lift clubs.

“Social networking is now broadly available, and we increasingly face not just technical design questions, but also social design questions,” indicated Shirky.

Shirky said organisations and businesses will need to learn to adapt to social media or die. “Learn as you go, because nothing social ever initially works the way you want to. If you commit yourself to an enormous project, by definition, you will miss the target.

“Every successful social system such as Wikipedia and Linux started by being small and good, rather than large and mediocre, and having people working together to make it bigger,” he added.

“It's the little experiments that have turned out to change the world. This is the most obvious message of social media and yet the most difficult message for organisations to take in.”

On future technology roadmaps, Shirky predicts there will be a fusion of mobile phone networks and the Web in coming years. “Social media has enabled anyone with a mobile phone in their pocket to receive information. And it's operating at a scale and speed that we've never seen before.”

However, Steven Ambrose, MD of World Wide Worx Strategy, says the more things change the more they stay the same. “Never before in the history of humanity have there been so many options to communicate with, thanks to the Internet.” But he says this doesn't mean social media will spell the end for newspapers.

“The large media organisations have much more credible impact than social media. However, because the social media is cutting-edge, it is driving the traditional mass media from the likes of CNN.

“A lot of news agendas are being picked up first by social media and then this drives the focus of the mass media. In Africa, certainly, television and newspapers will continue to be very powerful, but the hyper-connected will drive the information flow and create opportunities for the mass media,” said Ambrose.